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Thousands of children across the province are taking to heart the idea that charity begins at home, bringing the mandate of a Canada-based international charity back to its native soil.

This year, students in Grades 1 through 12 are helping drive more than a dozen grassroots campaigns organized through Free The Children, an organization renowned for its aid work overseas.

The campaigns tackle issues ranging from hunger at home to poverty abroad and culminate in the organization’s signature annual event, We Day, which will see some 20,000 students and teachers converge on Rogers Arena on Thursday to channel the spirit of community engagement and social responsibility along with big-name speakers and performers.

Sixth-grader Nadia Bigiolli is one of 240 students at Our Lady of Sorrows elementary school in East Vancouver who are participating in Free The Children’s local We Scare Hunger food drive in the lead-up to Halloween.

“I’m learning that not all people ... have the same great life I do,” she said.

Nadia and her schoolmates competed against each other in four teams to collect the most food, yielding roughly 1,250 non-perishable items that amount to more than 450 kilograms of goods for Vancouver food banks.

But Nadia’s efforts extend beyond the city limits.

“We are also learning that not all children around the world go to school. Many have to work and not all children have clean drinking water. We are doing our fundraiser to help people in other countries,” she said, referring to the We Create Change campaign as well as a poster she’d drawn for We Day depicting a ring of people holding hands around the globe.

The goal is to collect literally millions of pennies — while they’re still in circulation — to provide 100,000 people in developing countries with a permanent source of clean water and, indirectly, education, said Free The Children co-founder and We Day organizer Marc Kielburger in an interview.

“The number-one reason girls can’t go to school in sub-Saharan Africa in many communities in which we work isn’t because there’s no school; it’s because they actually have to instead go and get water for their villages,” he said.

Kielburger seeks to install pumps and wells near schools to allow young women to carry out socially prescribed domestic duties in addition to attending school. And he hopes to achieve this by leveraging the ingenuity of youth across Canada, “specifically by having young kids go raid parents’ penny jars and all that spare change that’s hidden in couches.”

Both the food drive and the water initiative harness the energy of young people to create quantifiable change at home and abroad, all the while fostering a sense of community and social responsibility, Kielburger said.

This is feasible in part because of a value shift that has created a sharply different set of attitudes than when he was in school.

“At times we were picked on, bullied, socially ostracized by the ‘cool kids.’ Changing the world was certainly not cool back then,” said the 35-year-old Toronto native. “It was about as cool as taking part in glee clubs. Seventeen years later, about the two coolest things you could be doing in high school are changing the world and taking part in glee clubs.

“What’s socially acceptable now is changing the world, and what’s not socially acceptable now is apathy.”

Carson Miller, a Grade 7 student at Hall’s Prairie elementary school in Surrey, embodies this outlook. He and his classmates launched a school-wide recycling, composting and gardening program last year in line with We Day themes of sustainability and community awareness.

“I just think that it’s good to set an example for other schools, and to help make the world a better place for their community,” he said of the composted soil that nurtures garlic, raspberries, perennial herbs and Egyptian wheat in three beds on school grounds.

“It’s nice to know that you’re not throwing out stuff that could be recycled, and it creates less garbage,” said Tayla Miller, Caron’s fourth-grade sister who participates in the recycling program.

“I like the gardening, because when you get out there it’s fun just to see life coming out of the earth, and it’s fun to just plant the stuff,” said sixth-grader Max Bishop.

Dr. Katherine White, an associate professor of marketing at the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business who has done research into charitable donations, says events like We Day and the campaigns that revolve around it are a good first step for young people.

“The We Day thing is a neat idea because not only is it cool and exciting and youth like that, but it also makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger. It probably has this effect of making changes seem possible.”

Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, applied developmental psychologist at the University of B.C.’s faculty of education, says food drives and penny collection impact young people more deeply than simply asking for parents’ credit card numbers.

“When they do work that is meaningful ... it develops a sense of purpose, a sense of their own agency, and it also promotes their sense of empathy and compassion.”

She said children can have a hard time visualizing the benefits — at home or abroad — that might result from their efforts since it requires abstract reasoning, making memorable events like We Day all the more impactful.

“It really is important to align the activities of volunteering and helping to their developmental stage,” she said.

Since 2009, young people in Canada have helped fundraise $20 million for 500 causes and volunteered more than three million hours for local and global causes involving 5,700 schools, according to Free The Children’s website.

We Day in Vancouver runs all day Thursday and features keynote speakers Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Magic Johnson and Craig and Marc Kielburger, as well as performers like Shawn Desman and OneRepublic.

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